Milestones

Jessie Zhao, a senior at Los Alamos High School, was recently honored as Rotary Student of the Month for December.
Zhao is the daughter of Shaoping Chu and Xinxin Zhao and sister of William and Steven Zhao.
The Rotary Club of Los Alamos selects one student each month of the school year to honor as a Student of the Month.
In addition to high school seniors, high school juniors are now eligible for the recognition.
Students are nominated by their teachers and chosen on the basis of their academic achievement, extra-curricular activities, and in particular, their service to the community.
Zhao is an active member of the LAHS Hilltalker Speech and Debate Team, an award-winning club, and currently serves as team president. In addition, she is a member of the National Honor Society and Key Club, and a youth leader for Café Scientifique, organizing lectures for teens to explore the latest ideas in science and technology.
In her junior year, Zhao volunteered at the White Rock Branch Library as an assistant in the youth summer reading program, and earlier this year, she began serving as a junior volunteer at the Los Alamos Medical Center, where she is a nurse assistant in the intensive care and surgical units.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Charles Durning, the two-time Oscar nominee who was dubbed the king of the character actors for his skill in playing everything from a Nazi colonel to the pope, died Monday at his home in New York City. He was 89.

Durning's longtime agent and friend, Judith Moss, told The Associated Press that he died Monday of natural causes in his home in the borough of Manhattan.

Although he portrayed everyone from blustery public officials to comic foils to put-upon everymen, Durning may be best remembered by movie audiences for his Oscar-nominated, over-the-top role as a comically corrupt governor in 1982's "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas."

Many critics marveled that such a heavyset man could be so nimble in the film's show-stopping song-and-dance number, not realizing Durning had been a dance instructor early in his career. Indeed, he had met his first wife, Carol, when both worked at a dance studio.

SILVER CITY, N.M. (AP) — Pablo Gutierrez, a lifelong Grant County resident who survived the infamous Bataan Death March during World War II and was among the last surviving members of his New Mexico National Guard unit who made it through the war, has died.

Gutierrez was 93 and died at the Gila Regional Medical Center in Silver City on Dec. 17 after developing respiratory complications and pneumonia, daughter Rosemary Gutierrez said Sunday.

U.S. Rep. Steve Pearce issued a statement calling Gutierrez a true American hero and real family man.

"I am grateful for his service to our country, and for the mark he left on his community." Pearce said. "The Gutierrez family is in my prayers."

SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) — House Speaker Ben Lujan, one of the most powerful and longest serving state legislators in New Mexico history and the father of U.S. Rep. Ben Ray Lujan, died late Tuesday at age 77 after a long battle with lung cancer, a spokesman for his son said.

He died at about 10:45 p.m. Tuesday after a brief stay at Christus St. Vincent's hospital in Santa Fe, Andrew Stoddard, a spokesman for Congressman Lujan, said early Wednesday.

The speaker's wife, Carmen, children and grandchildren were at his bedside when he died, Stoddard said.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Recovering from war wounds that left him with one arm, Danny Inouye wanted a cigarette and needed a light.

The nurse at the Army hospital in Michigan threw a pack of matches on his chest. He wanted to curse her. Instead, she taught him how to light it one-handed.

"Then she said, 'I'm not going to be around here for the rest of your life. You'll have to learn how to light your own matches, cut your own meat, dress yourself and do everything else. So from now on you're going to be learning,'" Inouye recalled decades later.

From that moment on it seemed like nothing would stop a determined Daniel K. Inouye, who died Monday after a uniquely American life defined by heroism in war and decades of service in the Senate — and a lifelong love of Hawaii symbolized by his last utterance.

PEARL HARBOR, Hawaii (AP) — More than 2,000 people at Pearl Harbor and many more around the country on Friday marked the 71st anniversary of the Japanese attack that killed thousands of people and launched the United States into World War II.

The USS Michael Murphy, a recently christened ship named after a Pearl Harbor-based Navy SEAL killed in Afghanistan, sounded its ship's whistle to start a moment of silence at 7:55 a.m., the exact time the bombing began in 1941.

Crew members lined the edge of the Navy guided-missile destroyer in the harbor where the USS Arizona and USS Utah, battleships that sank in the attack, still lie. Hawaii Air National Guard F-22 fighter jets flew overhead in a special "missing man" formation to break the silence.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — Willis Whitfield, an award-winning physicist known for inventing the modern-day cleanroom, has died. He was 92.

Sandia National Laboratories, where Whitfield worked for three decades, announced Monday that Whitfield died in Albuquerque on Nov. 12.

Lab President Paul Hommert says Whitfield's concept for a new kind of cleanroom came at the right time during the early 1960s to usher in a new era of electronics, health care and scientific research.

Dubbed Mr. Clean, Whitfield was born in Rosedale, Okla. He was the son of a cotton farmer.

Whitfield had his initial drawings for the new cleanroom by the end of 1960. His solution for dealing with the turbulent airflow and particles found in cleanrooms of the day was to constantly flush out the room with highly filtered air.

Sandia says within a couple of years, $50 billion worth of cleanrooms had been built worldwide.

J.R. Ewing was a business cheat, faithless husband and bottomless well of corruption. Yet with his sparkling grin, Larry Hagman masterfully created the charmingly loathsome oil baron — and coaxed forth a Texas-size gusher of ratings — on television's long-running and hugely successful nighttime soap, "Dallas."

Although he first gained fame as nice guy Capt. Tony Nelson on the fluffy 1965-70 NBC comedy "I Dream of Jeannie," Hagman earned his greatest stardom with J.R. The CBS serial drama about the Ewing family and those in their orbit aired from April 1978 to May 1991, and broke viewing records with its "Who shot J.R.?" 1980 cliffhanger that left unclear if Hagman's character was dead.

The actor, who returned as J.R. in a new edition of "Dallas" this year, had a long history of health problems and died Friday due to complications from his battle with cancer, his family said.